by Audrey Auden
“Currently, all of my online monitoring networks are searching for Eckerd. I will of course report to you as soon as I have further information concerning his whereabouts.”
“Damn,” Emmie said softly, disturbed by the idea that Amos could be anywhere out there now.
“I apologize for this disappointing news. However, I am happy to report that I have found a new lead regarding Amos Eckerd’s possible involvement in the Augur spliner malfunction.
“A review of the public records from Zeke Eckerd’s plea bargain showed that Augur’s IT department recovered a cached copy of the trojan responsible for the malfunction. I ran an analysis of the coding style in an attempt to identify the author, which turned up an almost ninety-eight percent match to the coding style of the public identity Didactix.”
“No way,” Emmie interjected, “I know Didactix. Well, I mean, he’s an acquaintance in Temenos. But his identity’s reputation speaks for itself. He would never write something like that. And if he did, he’d be smart enough to disguise it.”
“I was suspicious of the match as well. Even comparisons of code samples known to belong to the same coder typically have no better than an eighty-five percent match.
“Nonetheless, I met with Didactix to show him the results of the code analysis. He was quite upset to have been implicated in the attack, both because of the death involved and because of the poor quality of the trojan code. He claims to know nothing about it, and in his defense he showed me several examples of code recovered from recent data corruption attacks. Many of the code samples match the coding styles of public identities who, like him, have no apparent motive to develop such code.
“Didactix, along with several other of the implicated coders, have offered their services pro bono to help track down the actual program designer.”
“Well, that’s nice of them. But are we really likely to learn anything from that? Anyone might have been hired to write that trojan, and they could have done so without knowing a thing about who was going to use it, in the end.”
“Didactix seems to have something larger in mind than tracking down the coder of this particular trojan. He thinks that these mimicked coding styles could point to a single architect behind a number of recent cyberterrorist attacks.”
“You’re saying he thinks he can find a way to implicate the Church of the True Cross?”
“Per the confidentiality terms of our agreement, I did not mention the Church of the True Cross or Amos Eckerd. Didactix only knows what’s on the public record.”
“I don’t like it. Didactix has no idea what he’s getting himself into.”
“Well, as I made no formal arrangement with Didactix, neither you nor I will be held liable for the outcome.”
“That’s not my point! What —”
“Miss Bridges,” Falsens interjected, “I think you underestimate Didactix’s ability to take care of himself. He is a well-connected, high-reputation identity. My own analysis of his public social network suggests a high probability that he is part of the anonymous collective.”
“Well, even the collective hasn’t managed to identify the people behind these attacks so far.”
“They haven’t had any real motivation to do so. Their political leanings tend to be anarchic. They typically see large-scale attacks as beneficial in the long run, as they produce adaptive innovations that increase overall system security.”
“So why would they want to help with this now?”
“Because now it’s personal,” said Falsens.
“I really don’t think it’s a good idea to get them involved,” Emmie insisted, “They’re totally unpredictable.”
“I’m afraid it’s too late for that,” said Falsens, “Based on public chatter I picked up, Didactix had the collective engaged before my interview with him was even complete.
“What I came to tell you is that the anonymous collective has identified a section of obfuscated code in the Augur spliner trojan that seems to be shared in common with a number of trojans that have been used in attacks linked to the Church of the True Cross.
“The purpose of this obfuscated code is to listen on a network node for any activity containing data that matches an encrypted dataset stored within the trojan. A data match triggers various programs that produce catastrophic system failure on any hardware that might relay or cache the matched data, destroying the data as well as the trojan itself.
“Essentially, the trojan is designed to stop whatever this dataset is from entering or being accessed over networked systems.”
A horrible realization washed over Emmie.
“I tried to upload some files to the alternet from my smartcom while I was in the spliner,” she said slowly, “That’s what triggered the trojan.”
“What files were these?” asked Falsens.
Emmie hesitated, wondering if she should trust Falsens and Naoto this far. She realized then that, for all practical purposes, her life was already in their hands. And, anyway, she couldn’t see how she was going to figure out what to do with the tablet without their help.
“In his will,” she said, “Tomo Yoshimoto left me a storage tablet. His sister told me when she gave me the data that it was sensitive in some way. I just didn’t think about it when I sent the files off for translation.”
“A significant oversight,” Falsens said bluntly. Emmie blinked back tears as Falsens continued briefing her on his findings.
“Because the dataset shared by these trojans is encrypted, it is virtually impossible to recover the data, even if the trojan is itself recovered after an attack. This does offer some security to the designer of the trojan — the anonymous collective itself can’t tell what the data is that the trojan is intended to destroy.
“However, the anonymous collective finds it interesting that the encrypted dataset is identical, byte for byte, from one trojan to the next. A more secure method might have been to encrypt the dataset with a different key in each trojan. Given how much trouble the trojan designer has already taken to protect its identity — using code style matching, obfuscating the triggering function, designing the code to essentially self-destruct — it seems like a major oversight to leave evidence that all these different trojans are linked.
“This might mean that the program designer does not know what the dataset contains, only what the encrypted data looks like. It is possible that the program might not even recognize the data if it is in its unencrypted form, or if it is encrypted using a different key.”
“But that doesn’t make sense,” said Emmie, “These files aren’t encrypted. They opened right up on my smartcom, no authentication required.”
“That is interesting. May I examine the files?”
“Uh — are you sure you want to risk it?”
“I will send a hardware analysis program to Naoto’s smartcom. None of the data on the tablet will itself be transferred to me. I will only see the analysis summary.”
Emmie handed the tablet over to Naoto, who plugged it into a port on his smartcom. A moment later, the analysis summary popped up.
“Ah,” Falsens and Naoto said in unison.
“What?” said Emmie. Falsens explained,
“The storage tablet you have there is designed to mimic the form factor of a standard storage tablet that you might purchase from any office supply store. But the electrical impedance of the tablet surface ceramic indicates the presence of a biomaterial. This is common in devices that perform biometric authentication. This tablet seems to have been programmed to decrypt its contents only when you are the last person to touch it, and to re-encrypt the contents with a key contained within the un-encrypted data when it changes hands.
“Naoto, if you would confirm our hypothesis …”
Naoto swiped a few controls on his projection, and a filesystem browser opened up containing the message,
Device corrupted. Eject or reformat?
Naoto popped the tablet back out from his smartcom and handed it to Emmie, who in tu
rn plugged it into her smartcom. Her filesystem browser opened to reveal neat columns of files and folders, as it had before in the spliner.
“Very interesting,” said Falsens, “Whoever prepared this tablet wanted to make very sure that only you could access its contents.”
“But why?” said Emmie.
“I am unable to determine that based on the current information. Do you know what is on the tablet?”
“Tomo’s sister told me it’s the manuscript for a book about creation myths, but I haven’t really been able to decipher any of it.”
“I would need to run an analysis of the tablet’s contents to determine why such information may be sensitive in nature. We should now assume, however, that Amos knows you are the only person able to view this data. He has gone to quite a lot of trouble to ensure you cannot spread it widely by electronic means, and he now appears to be systematically attempting to eliminate the threat posed by you or anyone else who has seen the data.”
“So you can’t even look at this thing without becoming a target,” said Emmie.
“Hmm,” said Naoto, “Now there’s an interesting idea.”
Emmie raised an eyebrow.
“Interesting how?”
“We’ve been trying to figure out how we’re going to get you out of here, with these ground operatives crawling all over the place. What we could really use is a good old-fashioned diversion.”
“So …?”
“So, what if everyone becomes a target, all at once? As far as Amos’ people know, you’re the only one alive who knows what’s on that tablet, so they’re focusing all their efforts on you. But what if everyone knew what’s on that tablet? The Stewards can’t pick off everyone, at least not all at once.”
“Bad idea,” Emmie said decidedly, “The only way to get the information to any significant number of people is to get it out on the alternet. We’ve already seen what happens when you try to do that. I don’t think the world will appreciate it if we trigger a cascading alternet infrastructure meltdown trying to broadcast this.”
“The world might not appreciate it,” said Naoto, “But I think we know just the people who would.”
∞
As Naoto had anticipated, the anonymous collective had no qualms about risking the stability of the global alternet infrastructure in an effort to propagate information that someone wanted desperately to keep secret.
Within an hour, Falsens’ projection returned to deliver the news.
“The collective proposes a rather straightforward distribution method. We will send encrypted video streams of the files, recorded from cameras at your current location, to a small network of crowdsourced transcription services, which will in turn send encrypted video streams of the transcribed content to a second-degree network, and so on. The electronic format of the data will change from point to point. The first group of transcribers will upload their transcriptions to a collection of video streaming server farms located in the South Bay. This is close enough to your actual location not to be suspicious, but far enough away that we’ll hopefully clear out some of the operatives in our neighborhood.
“The anonymous collective will circulate the information that these video streams are a sensitive data leak and begin to vote up the streams, ensuring a general field day in conspiracy theory and rumor forums and, eventually, attention from the more popular media streams, as well.
“The collective anticipates, based on prior leak campaigns they’ve orchestrated, that the servers hosting the first group of video streams will be brought down by the Stewards within hours. When fifty percent of those servers go down, the second-degree transcription network will be scheduled to go live with their own streams. And so we will have rolling leaks which should be able to go on for at least a few hours, possibly more if the story gets better traction among the general public and we see small-scale data caching.”
“There could be so much system damage from that,” Emmie groaned, “People could even be killed. If you have alternet nodes go out, autopilot networks can go down, medical networks — it’s impossible to predict.”
“The collective believes that it is unlikely the architect of the trojans is prepared to trigger widespread infrastructure damage if the information leak is that widespread. It’s a catch-22. If they don’t destroy the infrastructure hosting the leaked information, it gets out. If they do destroy the infrastructure, they will have established the importance of the information, heightening public interest in the information and also risking scrutiny that might reveal their identity. Either way, they’re going to be scrambling for at least a few hours to contain the leak with backchannel methods before they realize the scale of the leak.”
Emmie raked her fingers through her hair, frustrated by her own indecisiveness.
“I don’t know. I don’t know. How can the collective be sure no one else will get hurt?”
“They cannot be sure,” Falsens said matter-of-factly, “You must decide whose lives you are willing to risk.”
Knowing full well how many lives she had already put at risk and how many more might yet suffer for it, Emmie nonetheless longed to strike back at the Stewards. Tomo had left this tablet to her for a reason. Surely she must do all she could to keep it from the hands of those who wished to destroy it. Steeling herself for the unknown, she said,
“All right. Let’s do it.”
∞
Naoto slipped out of the safe room in head-to-toe night camouflage to gather the cameras they would need from the perimeter security system of the church.
“Doesn’t that sort of undermine the whole idea of perimeter security?” Emmie had asked nervously.
“We’ll have to risk the blind spots,” he said, “Even the same-day delivery services won’t be able to get us the cameras we need fast enough. Just keep an eye out on the video feeds I showed you. Give me a holler on the shared channel if you see anything suspicious.”
He returned without incident, and as he set up the makeshift video recording studio, Emmie wrote a script to display each file on the tablet in succession: seven different projections for the seven different cameras Naoto had collected from the church exterior. By her calculation, the roughly ten thousand pages of documents and images on the tablet would take nine minutes to record and convert into an encrypted video stream, and another five minutes to upload to the servers of the human transcription services the collective had proposed for the first wave of the leak.
“Well,” said Emmie, as Naoto dimmed the lights so the recording could commence, “Here goes nothing.”
She hit the execute button on her script, and on the blank grey wall before them, hundreds of images flashed by in succession, three images per second per camera. She watched, mesmerized, as the illustrations and writings poured out on the wall, feeling an occasional flicker of recognition as something slipped by in the stream. When the recording concluded and the lights came on again, Emmie stepped back, dazed.
“Encrypting now,” said Naoto. Emmie chewed her lip anxiously.
“It’s not too late to stop this,” she said, watching the progress bar on the encryption approaching completion.
“Look, Emmie,” said Naoto, “I don’t want to scare you, but I don’t think we have a lot of options right now. I don’t want to see anything happen to you. Why don’t we just trust that the collective knows what it’s doing?”
“Seems like a pretty big leap of faith.”
The progress bar finished, and an upload confirmation prompt appeared before Emmie. Naoto looked at her and said,
“Falsens’ protocol. You’ve got to do the honors.”
There was no turning back now. Whatever the consequences, she was fully responsible. She closed her eyes and initiated the upload.
∞
Fifteen minutes later, alternet forums were already buzzing with news of the leak, and Naoto’s surveillance monitors showed that ground operatives scattered throughout the Bay Area had started to converge around the server far
m hosting the first video stream.
“We’re going to leave through the rear fire exit,” said Naoto, “We have to assume that all wireless communications may attract attention, so I’m going to need you to leave all your immergers, smartcom, everything with wireless capability, behind in the safe room.
“Once we’re on the road, there will be time to decide where best to take you.”
Emmie realized that there was only one place that she wanted to go.
“Naoto,” she said, reluctantly removing her immergers to place into the bag Naoto was holding out for her, “Can you take me to Amaterasu?”
Naoto nodded. Just before Emmie took off her headset, Falsens’ projection appeared.
“Of course, we will need your payment authorization first,” he said officiously.
Doubting that there would be anything left in her checking account by the time this was all over, Emmie waved her hand in assent. Dom had warned her. There was no telling the price, once the task was accepted.
∞
Neither cop nor ground operative intercepted them as they sped through the streets of downtown Oakland and wove through the middling midnight traffic on the freeway. Twenty minutes later, Naoto pulled to a stop on the tarmac behind the Oakland Business Jet center. He pointed to a small airplane up ahead.
“That’s us!”
Though Emmie had experienced countless flight simulations — prosaic commercial aircraft connections, thrilling helicopter tours, even whimsical bird rides — and visited much of the world through environment simulations, she had never actually set foot inside an airplane. She never would have imagined that her first trip would begin under such circumstances.
Naoto reached out his hand to open the door, then stopped and swore under his breath. Two men in dark uniforms had just stepped out onto the tarmac.